Old Isaacs, the Pawnbroker
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | Old Isaacs, the Pawnbroker |
,_landlord_with_family.jpg) | |
| Country of production | United States |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1908 |
| length | 10 mins |
| Rod | |
| Director | Wallace McCutcheon sr. |
| script | David W. Griffith |
| production | Biograph Company |
| camera | GW Bitzer |
| occupation | |
| |
Old Isaacs, the Pawnbroker or Old Isaac, the Pawnbroker ( German : Old Isaacs, the pawnbroker ) is an American melodrama by the director Wallace McCutcheon sr. from 1908 . The screenplay was written by David Wark Griffith based on the 1906 play Old Isaacs from the Bowery by Charles E. Blaney , which in turn was based on The Auctioneer by Charles Klein , Lee Arthur and David Belasco from 1901 and George H. Jessop's Sam'l of Posen dating back to 1886. The silent film is a production by the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company .
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action
In a poor accommodation a woman lies in bed feverish and hungry, cared for by her six-year-old daughter. A hard-hearted landlord has already asked the small family to vacate their apartment. Desperate, the mother sends her daughter to the Amalgamated Association of Charities , the fictional association of charities. But contrary to what was hoped for, no help is given, she is sent from one office to the next and finally learns that an investigation into the matter is necessary first. An investigator from the organization will not stop by the family until the coming week. When the daughter comes home from her walk, the exhausted mother sinks into unconsciousness.
Desperate, the girl goes to the (Jewish) pawn shop with a pair of old shoes, a valuable possession, to get money for a little food. There, too, she is turned away by an employee who does not accept the shoes, which he considers worthless. Back home, the girl says goodbye to her beloved doll and takes her to the pawn shop. When the clerk tries to send her away again, Old Isaac , the owner of the pawn shop, becomes aware of her. He interrogates the girl and instructs his employee to give her the money she wants.
Old Isaac follows the girl to her accommodation and on the way buys the essentials to improve the mother's condition. He arrives just in time to pay off the creditor and prevent the evacuation of the apartment. He also brings a doctor, food, clothes and the girl's old doll, along with a new and larger doll. The family is saved and freed from the greatest need.
Production notes
script
David W. Griffith had repeatedly tried to sell scripts to film studios. By the time he auditioned for the Biograph Company, he was repeatedly turned away, including by Edwin S. Porter at Edison Studios , who turned him down in 1907 with a script based on the opera Tosca and instead gave him a leading role in Rescued from an Eagle's Nest . The biographer wanted to employ Griffith as an actor, but bought several of his scripts, including those for Old Isaacs, the Pawnbroker and At the Crossroads of Life . This was of great importance to Griffith, as he already saw himself more in the role of screenwriter and film director . Financially, the rapidly written down scripts were worthwhile, they each gave him 15 dollars for a day of shooting as an actor, he received only $ 5.
The screenplay for Old Isaacs, the Pawnbroker was largely based on the 1906 play Old Isaacs from the Bowery written by Charles E. Blaney , which was quickly included in the repertoire of numerous touring theaters. This template was again a compilation of parts of the Broadway drama The Auctioneer by Charles Klein , Lee Arthur and the unnamed David Belasco from 1901 and George H. Jessop's melodrama Sam'l of Posen from 1886. Old Isaacs, the Pawnbroker was that first filmed script by Griffith.
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technology
The film is technically not at the level of 1908. This is mainly due to the fact that the Biograph Company has been in decline for some time and could not sell enough copies of its films, other companies such as Vitagraph were more innovative and creative. Still, Old Isaacs, the Pawnbroker has some interesting features. During the film, the little girl creates the connection between the locations of the plot by following her from take to take. The camera also follows her from room to room in the charity offices. When she reached the last office, an earlier shot is flashed back, the sick mother sits up in her bed coughing and sinks back down again, in the following shot the girl learns that the help she needs immediately will not be given. This parallel montage of spatially and (possibly) temporally separated shots was not used for the first time. Nevertheless, in 1908 and years later, such retrospectives were mostly not realized by cuts, but rather in a picture by double exposures . It was only David W. Griffith who later developed the parallel assembly used in Old Isaacs to become a master.
Old Isaacs, the Pawnbroker is a one-reeler on 35mm film that is 969 feet long . It was filmed in a studio in New York City on March 17, 18, and 19, 1908.
Distribution and lore
The film was first shown on March 28, 1908. A restored copy is in the National Center for Jewish Film at Brandeis University in Waltham , Massachusetts . It was released on VHS video in 1980 and later on DVD.
criticism
The Moving Picture World , in its March 28, 1908 issue, published a review, based on information from the Biograph Company , extolling Old Isaacs, the Pawnbroker for displaying the mercy of the Jewish protagonist. The film dispels the malicious slanders directed against the Jewish people ( (...) dissipates the malignant calumnies launched at the Hebraic race ). Although the story moves to tears, it also shows some lighter moments, for example during some funny scenes in the pawn shop.
The American film historian Eileen Bowser sees Old Isaacs, the Pawnbroker as a touching story from the world of the people who made up the cinema audience in the early 20th century: immigrants and members of the urban poor. Aimed at this target group, the film shows the slum dwellers positively and morally superior to members of the middle and upper classes. This makes it an exception, the topic of heroes from the lower class for the audience of the lower class was rarely taken up, although such films were often particularly successful. In general, contemporary film production was geared towards portraying the upper middle class and avoided portraying both high society and the poor in the main roles . The themes of the powerful but heartless and bureaucratic charity organization and the totalitarian reform movement were comparatively popular and appear repeatedly in David W. Griffith's cinematic work. Examples are Simple Charity (1910), The Reformers, or the Lost Art of Minding One's Own Business (1913) and finally Intoleranz (1916).
Bowser, her colleague Miriam Hansen, and numerous other film historians have studied Old Isaacs, the Pawnbroker . The Jewish pawnbroker Old Isaacs corresponds to the anti-Jewish stereotype of the usury Jew in terms of his profession. Also the physiognomy of the Jews, Old Isaac's artificial nose, his hairstyle and his clothes are reproductions of well-known stereotypical representations. This picks up on a long anti-Semitic tradition of American vaudeville that also found its way into early films. Examples are, in particular, anti-Semitic films from Edison Studios and Vitagraph: Cohen's Advertising Scheme (Edison, 1904), Cohen's Fire Sale (Edison, 1907) and Lightning Sketches (Vitagraph, 1907). The slapstick elements typical of vaudeville also offered a wide scope for despising minorities. On the other hand, there were already a number of Jewish comedians in the early film who turned the tables in plot frames such as the Wild West, the American Civil War or price wars and portrayed the Jewish protagonist as advantageous over other ethnic groups.
Melodramas like Old Isaacs, the Pawnbroker paint a positive image in a different way, they portray the Jew as generous and benevolent and his prosperity not as a symbol of Jewish greed but as a means of salvation from need, and they rewards the Jewish endeavor Assimilation . Old Isaacs also corresponds to this in that he follows the Christian commandments of charity and mercy and shows himself extremely courageous, compassionate and generous. The stereotypical representations of Old Isaac and the other Jewish actors, in terms of appearance and behavior, serve primarily to identify and make the plot easy to understand, not to stigmatize, in the context of this silent film. In fact, Old Isaacs' portrayal is extremely positive.
Old Isaacs, the Pawnbroker is one of the first representatives of the genre of ghetto films set in New York's Lower East Side , as a sub-genre of the immigrant film that was popular at the time, which portrayed the Italian, Irish and (rarely) German groups alongside Jews. In the ghetto films, the cultural contrasts between the traditional Judaism of immigrants and American society are mostly discussed. Prior to World War I , the themes were often broken relationships, as in The Ghetto Seamstress (Yankee, 1910), The Heart of a Jewess ( Universal Film , 1913), and A Passover Miracle ( Kalem Company , 1914). David W. Griffith also turned to the genre repeatedly, and as early as the autumn of 1908 he took up the lead role of the Jewish pawnbroker again as a director. However, his Romance of a Jewess is a comedy that deals with resistance to an arranged marriage. It has little in common with the deeply sentimental Old Isaacs, the Pawnbroker . With The Jew's Christmas in 1913 Lois Weber and Phillips Smalley first addressed the issue of mixed marriages and the younger generation's apostasy from the beliefs of their fathers, which determined ghetto films after the war.
literature
- David Mayer: Stagestruck filmmaker. DW Griffith and the American theater . University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 2009, ISBN 978-1-58729-790-8 .
Web links
- Old Isaacs, the Pawnbroker in the Internet Movie Database (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d Eileen Bowser : The transformation of cinema, 1907-1915 (= History of the American cinema , Volume 2). Charles Scribner's Sons, New York City 1990, ISBN 0-684-18414-1 , pp. 61-62.
- ↑ a b Film Review . In: The Moving Picture World , Volume 2, No. 13, March 28, 1908, p. 269, digitized .
- ↑ Iris Barry : DW Griffith. American Film Master (= Museum of Modern Art Film Library Series . Volume 1). Museum of Modern Art, New York NY 1940 (reprint, ibid 2002, ISBN 0-87070-683-7 ), pp. 11-12.
- ↑ a b c d Eileen Bowser: Griffith's film career before The Adventures of Dollie . In: Quarterly Review of Film Studies 1981, Volume 6, No. 1, doi : 10.1080 / 10509208109361075 .
- ↑ David Mayer: Deep Theatrical Roots. Griffith and the Theater . In: Charlie Keil (ed.): A Companion to DW Griffith . Wiley-Blackwell, Hoboken, New Jersey 2018, ISBN 978-1-118-34125-4 , pp. 175-190.
- ↑ a b David Mayer: Stagestruck filmmaker , p. 93.
- ^ Jon Gartenberg: Camera Movement in Edison and Biograph Films, 1900-1906 . In: Cinema Journal 1980, Volume 19, No. 2, pp. 1-16, JSTOR 1224867 .
- ↑ David Mayer: Stagestruck filmmaker , p. 278.
- ↑ Old Isaacs, the Pawnbroker in the Internet Movie Database (English) , accessed on January 5 of 2019.
- ^ Old Isaac, The Pawnbroker , National Center for Jewish Film website , accessed January 5, 2019.
- ↑ a b c Miriam Hansen : Babel and Babylon. Spectatorship in American Silent Film . Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London 191, ISBN 0-674-05830-5 , pp. 71-74.